I groan. “No.”
“And you know what the rule is for those, right?”
“Chocolate,” I say reluctantly.
“Right,” he says as he walks over to the pantry and pokes his head inside. He rummages around for a minute, then leans back to show me a half-empty bag of chocolate chips. “I’m guessing we’re not supposed to eat these.”
“You guessed right.”
“Well, this is an emergency,” he says, dumping them into a bowl as the puppy dances around at his feet. He sets it in the middle of the table, then stares at me until I take a chocolate chip.
Uncle Jake is a firm believer that important discussions go better with a side of sugar.
“So,” he says. “What’s on your mind?”
I give him a look. “You’re the one who wanted to talk.”
“You’re the one who compared yourself to the dog.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant.”
He takes a handful of chocolate. “So whatdidyou mean?”
“Nothing,” I say, aware of the stubbornness in my voice. But I’m too caught off guard by his persistence to string any of my thoughts together. This is usually Aunt Sofia’s territory. She’s always on the hunt for hidden meaning in anything I say and has an uncanny ability to take a comment on something as mundane as the weather and somehow relate it back to my past.
But not Uncle Jake. He’s good for a talk about financial responsibility or the importance of college, the many joys of fishing or which screwdriver to use in a given situation. But when it comes to conversations about what happened to me—especially those conversations that begin with a capital C—he’s always been eager to avoid them.
“Look,” he says now, pushing the bowl aside and leaning forward with his elbows on the table. His eyes—which look so much like my dad’s—are fixed on me. “I know what happened in San Francisco.”
I blink at him. This is not what I was expecting.
When I returned from the trip, my aunt and uncle peppered me with all the obvious questions:What did you think of Stanford?andWas it okay being back?andHow did it go with Teddy?(Not to mention:There wasn’t any funny business, right?And:Right?And:But seriously, right?)
I told them about the farmers market and the sound of the foghorns over the bay and how the city looked spread before us, all staggered buildings and steep inclines. About the beach and the bookstore and the Stanford campus, which had been even more beautiful than the pictures. But I didn’t tell them about the rush of memories that afternoon on the quad or the emptiness I’d felt standing in front of the house, how that piece of stained glass in my old window had just about broken my heart.
“Nothing happened,” I say, but Uncle Jake just gives me an even look.
“Teddy called us afterward.”
I feel my face get warm for no particular reason. “He did?”
“Don’t be mad at him,” he says when he sees my expression. “He knew you were upset and that you wouldn’t want to talk about it, and he was just trying to be a good friend.” He tilts his head to one side. “So what happened?”
I’m about to saynothingagain, but instead I try to think of what Icansay, try to come up with some version of the truth that doesn’t hurt so much, some route back there that isn’t quite so treacherous.
Beside me the puppy is batting at a loose string on the carpet like the world’s clumsiest cat, and I lean down to pick him up, pressing his warm body close to me.
“We went to the house,” I say eventually, keeping my eyes on the scarred wooden table. “It was…hard. Seeing it again. You weren’t there at the end. When Aunt Sofia was packing everything up. It was just the two of us and it felt so different, even then. Mom had been gone awhile. But it was like Dad just…” I hold up my hands and flick them open, making fireworks of my fingers. “Poof. Just like that. There, and then not.”
I lift my eyes to meet Uncle Jake’s, which are watery. He takes a swig of beer, then sets the bottle down a little too hard on the table.
“Anyway, I remember Aunt Sofia put Post-it notes on all our stuff so she’d know where it was going: you know, like pink for the garbage and blue for charity and yellow for Chicago. Something like that. I came down one morning and the whole house was covered with them. They looked like decorations, like confetti. I haven’t used one since.”
Uncle Jake clears his throat. “Alice…”
“The house used to be blue. Remember?”
He nods.
